The (somewhat) new teaser trailer to Henry Selick’s Coralinebegins with a command to put on your 3D glasses. This does you no good watching the thing in Flash (via Cineplex), so I’ve provided a special look at the trailer above (plus, it’s the only copy I could find on YouTube). It obviously appears to have been caught in a theater with a video camera, but I also think the bootlegger put his 3D glasses over the camera’s lens. I know, it’s difficult to tell, and I’m not even positive that would work, but to me it looks like some of the scenes have that extra depth. Of course, it could just be a 3D screen without the glasses. One shot seems especially blurry and comprised of a double image, which is kinda how a digital 3D image looks when you take off the glasses. Unfortunately, I’ve misplaced my own Real D frames and can’t test them out to see if they’d work with my computer screen (I’ll assume they don’t).
Okay, now that my head hurts a bit, let’s assess what we’ve seen (watch the Flash version if you don’t want eye and headaches). Well, there’s not much there, but it’s certainly enough for the Selick fans, especially those big enough to have helped the 3D rerelease of his The Nightmare Before Christmas make so much cash over the last couple Halloweens. I’ve never been all that into Selick’s work, as impressed with it as I may be, but I’ll see just about anything in digital 3D (I would have gone to the Hannah Montana movie if I wouldn’t have appeared to be a pervert) and I’m intrigued by a few shots that remind me a little of Jan Svankmajer and the Brothers Quay.
Coraline won’t arrive in theaters until February 6, 2009. Hopefully my eyes will be back to their normal focusing abilities by then.
Weird. Leo DiCaprio will produce a live-action, “two-part epic” based on the classic manga/anime Akira. The story will be adapted to take place in New Manhattan, “a city rebuilt by Japanese money.” The HR story actually doesn’t specify whether or not Leo will star in the thing, but if so, I imagine they’ll also “adapt” this skull-head getup so that Warner Brothers can actually see what they’re paying for.
Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman will adaptBlack Hole, a graphic novel about promiscuous teens passing around a mystery STD (hot), for David Fincher to direct.
Isn’t it a little weird that Variety editor Tim Gray doesn’t actually make a Best Picture prediction in the Best Picture prediction video above? Does this give credence to the “Juno is the new Crash” nightmare scenario that’s been floating around? Or is he just contractually not allowed to disappoint his advertisers?
Co-writers Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman introduced a reel of fully-rendered footage from Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf last night at Comic-con, and the reviews are rolling in.
It is very easy to imagine, based on this small amount of footage, that Beowulf could be a huge smash that critics can actually get behind and that it could be a serious Academy player in the way Lord of the Rings was. Though this is not a trilogy, it seems ready to break even more ground in a real way. (The issue of acting nominations was something Avery & Gaiman considered out loud in the room tonight. With big names like Hopkins, Jolie, and Malkovich, one thinks they might actually turn that trick if all the pieces come together. The great Ray Winstone, who doesn’t look like himself, might have trouble on that basis alone.)
IGN’s Todd Gilchrist says that although Beowulf relies on the same motion-capture process Zemeckis used for The Polar Express, the director seems to have avoided the major failing of that film:
The main problem director Robert Zemeckis’ Polar Express faced was its (literal) absence of life behind the CGI characters’ eyes, and Beowulf appears to have conquered this technical challenge: all of the characters act and react with a palpable sense of reality, not to mention a febrile kind of unpredictability, creating a much more authentic and evocative emotional backdrop for the larger-than-life story. Meanwhile, the general proficiency with which computer-generated imagery is rendered has evolved by leaps and bounds since those earlier films, creating an increasingly believable but nonetheless spectacularly melodramatic universe in which Beowulf’s adventures are concrete and also fantastic.
The Post Chronicle’s naked-Angelina Jolie-centric write-up is just creepy:
Brad Pitt’s lover Angie shows her sexy side once again as her naked body emerges from a dark pool of water, with little droplets of water dripping down her every curve.
The film’s trailer is now on Apple, so skip over there if these reports have made you salivate.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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